Socialising with colleagues who have emotionally demanding jobs makes yours more demanding too

Companies that want to ensure their employees’ performance remains high, should enable employees to develop strong work-based social networks, says Andrew Parker

It’s pretty much accepted that in a work environment, networks are critical. Not only can a strong network provide people with job opportunities and the potential for new projects, but can also enable them to seek out advice, insights, and support from others in order to perform better in their current role.

Receiving emotional support and practical advice from a colleague can really help those with emotionally demanding jobs to relieve pressure and feel more at ease – after all, they do say a problem shared is a problem halved. But, is sharing that problem always a positive? Well, whilst it may provide a measure of relief for some, our research shows that, for those who socialise with people who have emotionally demanding jobs, their own feeling of job-related emotional demands can increase.

This research, which I conducted with colleagues from Aarhus University and Microsoft, sought to investigate the link between emotional job demands, work-based social networks, and employee performance over time.

Many employees face significant, and numerous demands in their jobs – for example, through emotional or cognitive demands – and companies should have a number of resources in place to support those workers feeling the strain. When there are more resources to counteract the job’s demands, it can benefit employees’ performance, engagement, and wellbeing. But, it is clear in some instances that employees have more demands than resources, meaning that, often, employees rely on their work-based social networks for additional support.

In order to understand the relationship between performance, emotional demands, and network support, we analysed more than 130 employees at a manufacturing company, surveying them on their work environment and the demands that come with their role. We asked the employees about their work-based social networks – who they were connected to – and how they sought support from their network.

We then asked supervisors from the same company to evaluate the individual performance of each employee and used a statistical modelling framework to analyse the simultaneous changes in employees’ social networks, emotional demands, and performance. This model also accounted for the extent to which individual demographics, such as tenure and gender influence changes in the network, emotional demands, and performance.

The results of the research clearly revealed a social contagion effect – when behaviours and affects flow from one person to another. Specifically, emotional demands flowed from one person to another through their social relationships.

High emotional job demands

Individuals with high emotional job demands benefit from the support of their network of relationships as it gives them the opportunity to vent. However, what is the effect on the person providing the emotional support by lending their colleague a shoulder to lean on? For the person playing confidant, it’s clear to see there is little reward in doing so. They may act as a buffer for their highly stressed colleague, but also end up experiencing a more stressful job environment because of this. Our research shows that work-based social ties are a double-edged sword from which some benefit and others are set to suffer.

In addition, our research shows that for those individuals with high emotional job demands who build wider work-based social networks there are positive outcomes over and above having a shoulder to lean on as these supportive relationships result in a beneficial impact on employee performance. Those who had a strong and large work-based social network felt a lesser impact on their performance when experiencing emotional job demands, whereas those with smaller networks were more likely to feel the negative effect. Such findings demonstrate just how vital receiving support from a network can be in mitigating the effects of emotional job demands and that this actually has a positive effect on key outcomes such as employee performance.

These results indicate that individuals are able to balance the negative effects of emotional job demands on their performance through their work-based social ties, even if these ties result in an emotional contagion effect on their colleagues.

So how can employees, and their organisations, ensure that the positive impact of social network ties for some outweighs the negative impact on others?

Companies want to ensure their employees’ performance remains high, should look at enabling employees to develop strong work-based social networks, by ensuring they have support outside of their immediate work friendship groups and, crucially, make sure employees aren’t experiencing too many emotional demands in their roles in the first place.

Job rotation

Tools such as job rotation could counteract high emotional job demands. Rotating employees through different roles can help ensure they do not feel the full effects of demand from a job for too long. Such rotations also help to freshen up employees’ networks by introducing them to new colleagues on a regular basis and can help to break apart unproductive network relationships.

Organisations should also look to have a longer, harder think about the teams and groups they are creating instead of focusing on the individuals they are utilising to fill each role. Individuals are certainly important, but the way in which they can collaborate with each other and bring the best out of each other too is, arguably, more so. The sum is greater than the parts.

Ensuring managers are thinking about the whole team can decrease the negative outcomes of emotional job demands in the workplace. It is not necessarily just one individual in a network that can create the emotional demands contagion effect, but the combined effect of many. Therefore, job rotation is not always an effective cure… but building the right team is.

For future research, it is key that we develop our understanding of how work-based social networks mitigate work demands as well as work-life conflict, and how this may affect performance too. Also, the role that job demands can play on hindering life satisfaction more generally, and whether network ties can buffer against this, is also worthy of investigation as our workplaces become ever more hybrid and the line between work and home is eroded.